Uncle Jack never actually saw the sun this morning but for a few minutes Mother Nature put on a cloud show that made his damp walk to the beach most rewarding. It looks like August will slosh off the scene today with the chance of rain about 80%.  It rained off and on all day yesterday and into the evening so South Nags Head, former wetland,  has reverted to its natural state in many areas including Uncle Jack's back yard.

    If Geraldo or whatever its name is is planning to kick up some surf as it goes by it hasn't started yet.  The ocean is fairly calm at the moment and there is little or no wind. Let us hope it stays that way.

    Yesterday was very special in the cuisine department because Mrs. U.J. whomped up a crab salad in honor of her visiting daughter Colleen from Baltimore where good crab meat is hard to come by as everybody knows.  Lucky for us the crab meat in the salad was the finest lump backfin money can buy and it came from Daniels Crab House on the causeway, one of Nags Head's oldest and finest seafood emporia. Lump backfin is expensive at $21 a pound but it goes a long way and provides a truly gourmet experience at a fraction of the cost of almost anything you can find in any restaurant.  The crabs are cooked and picked fresh daily at Daniels and the product is unsurpassed anywhere.  Check it out is Uncle Jack's advice, before it is too late. The way excellent small businesses are vanishing on the Outer Banks you never know.

Disclosure:  Uncle Jack has absolutely no fiduciary interest in Daniels Crab House. He only  hopes it will last at least as long as he does. 

Today's witticism: "A hangover is the wrath of grapes".

     The penultimate day of August is starting out like a party-pooper.  Heavy rain  began in the middle of the night accompanied by thunder and lightning and while the rain seems to have tapered off, at 6:30 the sky is completely socked in and sunrise does not look promising. A couple of hours from now it could be gorgeous but right now it looks like the area's merchants could be in for a boffo day.

     If shoppers are foolhardy enough to venture out onto the bypass that is.  Uncle Jack had to make two trips up the road to the 9 mile post yesterday and he feared for his life both times..  Constant vigilance is required to avoid collisions with cars whose drivers often seem to be disoriented, drunk or both.  There is so much visual clutter along the road that even Uncle Jack has trouble finding his destination sometimes.  Such is the price of progress, apparently.

      There is nothing new about this, of course. Uncle Jack wrote this piece so long ago he can't remember exactly when:

    Yesterday was a red letter day for Uncle Jack with the arrival of his new Sony Cybershot W-100 camera.  He has managed to charge the battery and has spent a couple of hours puzzling over the instructions with little success but he did manage to take a few pictures with it last evening and again this morning.  Obviously he has much to learn but it's wonderful to have a camera that fits into his shirtpocket again.

     Yesterday was extraordinary in another way in that he paid his first visit to the Dare County Library in KDH in several years.  Now that he is retired and has a lot more time on his hands he plans to spend a lot of time in that estimable establishment. 

     While he was there yesterday he picked up a free copy of the 11th Annual "State of the Coast" report entitled "Saving Our Coastal Heritage" published by the North Carolina Coastal Federation. He had read bits and pieces of it in the local newspapers when it came out a few weeks ago but they did not do justice to the whole publication.

      He highly recommends that if you have any interest in what is happening to the coastal areas of this state that you email them at nccf@nccoast.org or check out their website at www.nccoast.org and ask for a copy of this spendid piece of journalism. It's both scary and hopeful but it does a great job of laying out the challenges that face coastal communities everywhere as they battle with the juggernaut of development.

Today's aphorism: "Procrastinate now!"

     Uncle Jack is having computer problems this morning and just watched 20 minutes worth of his elegant prose disappear into cyberspace, never to be seen again except possibly by somebody at the C.I.A. He is too p----d off right now to start over again.  It must be Monday.

    He will try to put up some pictures of the sunrise and maybe do another blog entry later if he can figure out what's wrong.

    Have a nice day.  Aargh.

     Not the most inspiring sunrise this morning but as (almost) always, the beach was the place to be.  All indications point to another fairly hot and humid day, much like yesterday, but at dawn the air is still tolerable and the extraordinarily wide beach uncrowded.  The tide is such that you could drive a Mack truck around the sandbagged houses without getting the tires wet this morning. The public has its beach back for a little while.

     Here's another sample from Uncle Jack's new book which he sent off to the printer for a cost estimate last Friday.  With any luck it should be available for purchase next spring by the thousands of readers who have been waiting with 'bated breath for its appearance. Ha. He can't remember if he ran this one before or not but in any case it's for all the teachers who are strapping on their armor and wading into battle again this week or the next.  Good luck.

   The sunrise was quite pretty this morning but you will have to take Uncle Jack's word for it.  His ancient Sony Mavica camera, which uses floppy disks for film, kept flashing the words "disk error" every time he took a picture so he stopped after a while.  Then when he got home he found that it had been taking pictures all along, albeit not very good ones and none at all of the final stages of sunrise.

     Help is on the way in the form of a Sony DSC-W100 digital camera which is on the way to him from California as we speak. It will replace the beloved Canon Elph which he inadvertently bathed in the ocean a few weeks ago.  It purports to have 8 megapixels which should result in better pictures but it lacks the 10x optical zoom he has come to love in his clunky old Mavica. (Sorry guys. No more pier shots.)

     Uncle Jack's technological world seems to be falling apart at the moment.  First he drowned his camera, now his DVD player won't work and both his computers keep giving him error messages when he attempts to open websites in Explorer.  He suspects the latter may be caused by a glitch at Charter Cable which he hopes they will fix themselves because he dreads having to try to communicate with their robot. She has a lovely voice but he thinks she may have Alzhimer's.

     He attended a workshop on beach renourishment at the Nags Head town hall yesterday where he listened to a representative of  Coastal Science and Engineering talk about various aspects of the renourishment plan his company has drawn up for the Nags Head commissioners.  The gentleman exuded confidence in his plan which he claims will provide the town with ten year's worth of protection for oceanfront structures at a cost of only $32 million and change.

     Uncle Jack has always been a little dubious about such forthright predictions of what the ocean can be expected to do or not do over such a long period of time.  Recent experience with the post-Isabel FEMA berm project in South Nags Head provides a case in point.   Rather large sections of the  "5 year" berm had washed away even before the entire project was completed.  This does not fill one with confidence that predictions by coastal scientists and engineers (especially those with a direct fiduciary interest in selling their services) can always be relied upon.

    He will have more to say about this as time goes on but he is going to take the week-end off from pontificating.  Have a nice day wherever you are.

      Rather a bland morning on the beach.  Cool and pleasant.  Not a cloud in the sky for the sun to play with so sunrise was less than inspiring. Looks like another fabulous beach day to finish out an entire week of nearly flawless daytime weather during which a good time seems to have been had by all. The concrete guys and the Terminix sprayer will vie for Uncle Jack's attention today so it should be a pretty exciting Friday.  

The sermon continues:

       On this date in 1992 the surviving residents of South Florida were contemplating the devastation left in its wake by Hurricane Andrew that had blown through the area the day before.  Uncle Jack drove through some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods three months later on his way to Key West and he remembers the shock and awe he experienced at seeing what the raw power of nature can do to man's flimsy constructions.  Not until Hurricanes Katrina and Rita smashed the Gulf coast from Alabama to Texas last summer did he see anything with his own eyes to match that scene.

      He has these pictures in his mind whenever he thinks about "beach renourishment" as a solution to the problems faced by oceanfront property owners on the Outer Banks as inexorable natural forces propel our beloved sandspit to the west.  Events like Andrew and Katrina and Rita and even our own recent Isabel (a minor blow by contemporary standards) demonstrate convincingly the futility of  trying to stave off the inevitable by what amounts to throwing sand in the face of Mother Nature.

      The Town of Nags Head proposes to spend $32 million on what could best be described as a sandy band-aid for a gaping wound that will refuse to heal.  Taxpayers will be exhorted to lend their financial support to this desperate attempt to "do something" to keep the ocean from claiming any more valuable oceanfront property.    

      If past experience is a reliable guide, these exhortations will come largely in the form of  fear-mongering.  Failure to "save our beaches" (sic) by dumping dredge spoil on them will result in the economic ruin of every person now living and working on the Outer Banks. That's the story we will be encouraged to believe.

      Loss of tax revenue from oceanfront structures will be cited  as a major reason for pushing ahead with beach renourishment.  This argument conveniently ignores the fact that higher taxes will have to be imposed on all residents of the town in order to keep rental income flowing into the coffers of oceanfront property owners.  How the net income from taxes on endangered ocean front  property can exceed the net outflow of tax money to protect them is not explained.

      Tourists will stop coming to the Outer Banks if we don't "do something" right away to "save our beaches" we will be told.  Uncle Jack has walked the beaches of South Nags Head almost every day this summer and has seen no evidence that visitors have stopped coming to a part of Nags Head that at least one county commissioner has described as some kind of disaster area.  The summer beaches for the most part have been wide and inviting, providing plenty of room for throngs of visitors to do just about anything they can think of---including hitting golf balls as some idiots Uncle Jack encountered on his walk yesterday were doing. (Not into the ocean as some golfers were doing the other day but down the beach where people were walking and sitting!)

     There are a few parts of Nags Head that are ugly and uninviting and where the beach is narrow or even non-existent at times.  They are precisely where owners have been allowed to armor their buildings with huge sandbags which have caused the beach in front of them to wash away.

     These houses should be removed from the beach as so many others have been before them---before the false hope of  salvation by beach renourishment was dangled in front of their owners.  If structures are removed when they begin to encroach on the public beach there seems to be no reason why South Nags Head could not continue to have a lovely natural beach for many decades to come without the expenditure of vast amounts of money that might better be used to clean up after the storms that will continue to batter the Outer Banks until the end of time.

     Many of the delightful old cottages in the Nags Head "historical section" have survived over a century on the ocean front by the simple expedient of  moving back when they had to.  More important is the fact that the beach in that area has survived and is as wide and beautiful as it was when Uncle Jack first walked on it more than 35 years ago.  Barring another catastrophic event like the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 (which cannot really be barred)  they could still be there 35 years from now.

     Or maybe not.  The only thing that is absolutely certain about living on a barrier island is that nothing is predictable. 

      End of sermon for today. 

      After three straight days of darkness at dawn Mother Nature came out of her funk this morning and put on a sunrise that must have delighted the handful of folks who were up to see it.  It's getting a lot easier to view the sunrise these days because it doesn't come up until almost 6:30.  Even Uncle Jack slept in until 6 this morning and still made it to the beach in plenty of time.

     Yesterday started out badly but like the first two days of the week it turned into a flawless beach day.  Today is starting out magnificently but who knows what will happen as the day goes on.  It's in the mid-70's right now with a light wind out of the north under an almost cloudless sky. This is truly prime time on the Outer Banks, especially because there are no potential hurricanes on the horizon.

   Uncle Jack has been bloviating for the past couple of days on the subject of what can be done about the fact that the Outer Banks are steadily moving westward and the ocean has begun to encroach on a lot of buildings that were unwisely built in its path.  Here's another installment:     

   Beach renourishment is, to say the least, a contentious subject.  It is seen as the road to salvation by many, including nearly all oceanfront property owners, persons whose livelihoods are dependent in one way or another on income from oceanfront property such as real estate mavens, and most politicians in oceanfront communities who feel that they must be seen as "doing something" about "erosion".

       It is seen by others, including Uncle Jack, as a chimera, a false hope, a waste of money and resources that could be better spent in facing the problem of our moving shoreline realistically. He has done his best to study the evidence in the historical record regarding the success or failure of beach renourishment projects elsewhere on the Atlantic coast and he is convinced that it won't work here any better than it has anywhere else.  In fact it astonishes him that anyone who  watched firsthand while hurricanes Dennis and Isabel assaulted the Outer Banks in recent years could believe that the cosmetic application of a few million cubic yards of sand to our beaches before those storms would have significantly reduced the amount of property damage inflicted by them. 

     Had a major beach renourishment project (say $32 million worth) been completed  before Isabel it would most likely have disappeared overnight as has happened in so many places on the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf.  Then another project would be required, and then another for ever and ever. Sysiphus and his boulder had it easy compared to barrier island communities squeezed onto narrow sandspits in the Atlantic ocean.

      As long as owners and developers of oceanfront property are not forced to bear the real costs of keeping their investments intact the manic pace of oceanfront development will continue.  The federal government is partially responsible for this folly by offering low cost flood insurance for buildings in high hazard areas.  (This could change dramatically as new rules go into effect in the near future, but probably not enough). 

       Again the federal government has encouraged the folly of  oceanfront building by lavishing untold millions of dollars on beach replenishment projects up and down the coast. This, too, is now seen by its perpetrators as a costly exercise in futility. (Just another of the many our government seems to embark upon with depressing regularity).

       Now local governments are under tremendous pressure to "do something" when there really isn't anything sensible to be done but  require oceanfront property owners to get their buildings off the beaches when the ocean overtakes them.  Politically this is so difficult that our local lawmakers will persist in trying to raise vast sums of  tax money to throw at the problem even though it won't make it go away in the long run.

      They are counting on "educating" the citizens of  Dare county and its communities, the vast majority of whom do not own oceanfront property, as to why beach renourishment is our only hope and why it must be supported by all who live here, not just by those who have vested interests in preserving their oceanfront investments.

      If events leading up to the overwhelming rejection of the county's ill-fated 1% sales tax for beach renourishment are any indication, we should be prepared for another onslaught of propaganda from the pro-nourishment interests. There will be dire warnings of  imminent disaster to all who live and work on the Outer Banks if  we do not cough up, now and in perpetuity,  the millions of dollars it will take to "save our beaches".  (Never "save our oceanfront rental houses" but always "save our beaches" even though beach renourishment has little or nothing to do with saving beaches).

     The voice of Chicken Little will be heard in the land once again as the well-heeled pro-nourishment forces roll out their armamentarium of half-truths, distortions and obfuscations in an effort to frighten the rest of us into supporting what many believe to be a foolish and costly program.

    Uncle Jack will review a few of the misleading and sometimes preposterous  arguments that the pro-nourishment folks will throw at us in the run-up to Nags Head's referendum on the issue as soon as he catches his breath.

     South Nags Head is solidly socked in with clouds this morning so there won't be any new sunrise pictures for third day in a row.  It's not exactly raining right now but it looks like it might so Uncle Jack will eschew his usual beach walk for a while to see what happens.  Yesterday finally made nice by noon and maybe today will do the same.

     He will use the time instead to continue his windy dissertation on what can be done on the Outer Banks to cope with the scourge of "erosion"---more accurately the age-old and inexorable movement of the Outer Banks to the west.  Yesterday he answered the question posed by Bob from New Jersey, to wit: "What can we do?" with the somewhat flippant sounding "Get out of the way."  Today he will elaborate.

     He truly believes that those coastal geologists (and Orrin Pilkey of Duke is only one of many) who have concluded after years of study that there is only one sensible, sustainable approach to dealing with the westward movement of barrier islands and that is to retreat in the face of it.  They recognize that it is foolish to build anything on the oceanfront but once that has been done it is even more foolish to try to keep buildings there once the ocean overtakes them as it inevitably will.

      The Coastal Area Management Act courageously reflected this knowledge when it banned the use of hardened structures to protect oceanfront structures nearly 35 years ago. Unfortunately this wise law has been gutted by successive amendments permitting the use of sandbags on a temporary basis to allow structures to be moved out of harms way.  This sensible accommodation to the needs of oceanfront property owners has been flouted to the point where hundreds of buildings (perhaps thousands, with more to come) are anchored in place by mountains of  huge sandbags which have kept them in place for years.

      The inevitable result, as plainly seen in many parts of South Nags Head, is that buildings so protected are now sitting in the ocean much of the time with no beach in front of them at all except during periods of extreme low tide, and sometimes not even then. No effort has been made to move these buildings out of harm's way as the original law intended, and no effort has been made by authorities to enforce the law.

      The usually accepted explanation for this failure is that oceanfront property owners should be allowed to protect their buildings until something called "beach renourishment" has been accomplished, after which the sandbags can be safely removed.  Local governments have committed themselves to carrying out some kind of beach renourishment as soon as funds can be obtained with which to do it.

     This is no longer as easy as it once was when the federal government lavished countless millions on beach replenishment projects planned and supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers (recently infamous for its faulty design and construction of failed levees in New Orleans).  When the federal government, not noted for its fiscal restraint in any area of human endeavor,  decided not to waste any more money on futile beach renourishment projects it should have caused local governments to think twice about the wisdom of spending local taxes in the same way.

     But it didn't so now we are in a holding pattern while local governments try to figure out how to raise the vast amounts of money required to dump dredged sand on the beaches in a costly and never-ending effort to stave off the inevitable destruction of  the buildings that happen to be in danger at his particular moment in geological time.

    It is Uncle Jack's contention, and that of most coastal scientists and many other people who have studied this issue, that to embark on this course of action is foolish and indefensible. Entire books ("Against the Tide" by Cornelia Dean is a particularly good one).  Readers would get a much fuller picture of the issue by reading one of those tomes than by listening to Uncle Jack fulminate but he has up a pretty good head of steam now and will continue this tomorrow.  

 Hang in there. He will run out of gas sooner or later.

       It's raining in South Nags Head again this morning so Uncle Jack won't be taking any pictures of today's sunrise.  No doubt the sun will rise but he won't be able to see it so there's no point in walking up to the beach.

     He will use his beachwalking time instead to begin to try to answer the question posed by Bob C. of New Jersey in yesterday's "comments", to wit U/J....WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER TO THE BEACH PROBLEM WHICH IS CONSTANT TROUBLE EVERY STORM....IF THE WATER KEEPS COMING....AND WE BOTH KNOW U DONT STOP IT .......WHATS THE ANSWER??????IN UR OPINION

     Basically Uncle Jack's answer is "get out of the way".  The ocean is pushing the Outer Banks to the west in a process that has been going on for thousands of centuries.  Up until relatively recently, say the last century or so, this has not posed a problem for anyone.  There were no man-made structures in place to be affected by this inexorable westward movement of the land so there was no particular need for anyone even to understand what was happening.

     Roughly a hundred years ago people started building houses and permanent roads on the Outer Banks relatively close to the westward-moving shoreline. This was a radical change from earlier times when the first non-native settlers built their structures (there were no roads to worry about) as far from the ocean as the width of the islands permitted. (Even then they often could not escape the damaging effects of ocean overwash during severe storms which routinely destroyed buildings even on the sound side of the islands).

     In recent decades all the lessons that could have been learned from the past history of the Outer Banks have been ignored.  Development along the shoreline has proceeded at a manic pace with little or no thought about the long-term consequences of building "permanent" structures at the edge of the sea.

     Some of the oldest oceanfront structures in Nags Head have survived the westward movement of the land under them for over a century by the simple expedient of moving with it.  The oldest of the cottages in the "historic district" have been picked up and moved back several times on their deep lots. 

     They have been moved back so far, in fact, that they are pushing up against the first "permanent" road in Nags Head, the Beach Road built in 1930, the year Uncle Jack was born as fate would have it.  Today both Uncle Jack and the Beach Road are, in a sense, reaching the end of their useful lives.  (Is that morbid or what?)

     The Beach Road opened up the entire ocean front from Kitty Hawk to Whalebone for development of everything from tiny summer cottages to large hotels. Many of the earliest structures, including some large ones like the Arlington Hotel, long ago succumbed to the steady westward movement of the land under them. Others, like the First Colony Inn, were removed to safer locations and are enjoying a second life.  

     Mistakes of the past were compounded when developers pushed down into South Nags Head below Whalebone Junction in the 60's.  Much of the land between the new road (Old Oregon Inlet Road) and the ocean was carved up into small lots served by streets running east and west which allowed many more structures to be built than would have been the case if deep lots had been platted running from the edge of the ocean back to the road.  The latter would have allowed houses to be moved back as they were threatened just as was done in the historic district.

     Problems developed very quickly in South Nags Head.  The land under the first rows of new cottages began to move out from under them as soon as they were built, leaving many of them "high and wet" as it were. Some could be moved straight back if the lot behind them was still vacant.  Others were moved elsewhere, often to the other side of Old Oregon Inlet Road which is now almost solidly built up.

    Whole streets in South Nags, like the oceanfront section of Altoona Street, washed away in storms and many cottages went with them.  Many others were saved by prudent owners who moved them out of harms way while they still could.

     In spite of all the obvious evidence that South Nags Head was a very risky place to build anything on or near the oceanfront the pace of development has been frenetic.  Small buildings have been moved off the oceanfront, not to save them but to make room for huge houses.  There is little or no land left to which the smaller, older cottages now threatened by the sea can be moved.

     So now what do we do?  asks Bob C. from New Jersey.    Uncle Jack, the indefatigable windbag, will offer his considered opinion in this space tomorrow.  Stay tuned if you wish.

Today's witticism:"God must love stupid people. He made so many".    

      This is Monday with a vengeance.  Uncle Jack started for the beach a few minutes ago, camera in hand, only to discover that a light rain is falling out of a completely overcast sky.  Needless to say there will be no sunrise pics this morning.  Maybe he can find one in the archives to cheer you up.

      Yesterday was pure August on the Outer Banks.  Hot as Hades and humid as Houston. In other words perfect beach weather.  If the weatherperson is correct there won't be another one like it until later in the week. Merchants must be quivering with anticipation.

     Here's something from the archives to help while away a few minutes as your Monday afternoon in front of the computer begins to drag:

     Yet another spectacular morning on the beach in South Nags Head, North Carolina. Light wind out of the northeast, relatively dry air for this time of year, temperature in the mid-70's and a gorgeous, sky-filling sunrise to top it all off. Again Uncle Jack's heart goes out to all those, including his own grandson and spouse, who have to leave the beach today.                                                   

      Andy and Liz started their long trek to Fitchburg, Mass. in the dark at 5:30 this morning and probably won't get home until 9 p.m. or later depending on the traffic). Uncle Jack once made the same trip some years back in his new secondhand Jeep and lived to write a column about it which he wishes he could find.  It included a near-death experience on the Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River which still flashes into his mind from time-to-time.

     The return trip on that occasion was even more memorable.  Uncle Jack had over-imbibed the night before on a Scandinavian mulled wine called "glug" which he used to wash down vast quantities of pickled herring, Swedish meatballs, Christmas cookies and other assorted delicacies at what is known among Swedes as a "Lucia Fest".  Never before or since has he been so hung over which would have been bad enough in itself but his misery was compounded by an ice storm the night before which coated all the streets and highways in the area with a glaze of ice.

    Somehow he slipped and slid to dry ground in Connecticut and then proceeded to bounce along interstates in his short-wheelbase Jeep all the way to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where his growing queasiness could no longer be denied.  He checked into a fleabag hotel and spent several hours throwing up before exhaustion overwhelmed illness and he fell asleep.

    He felt very little better the next morning when he departed for Nags Head, no doubt leaving the maids wondering which motorcycle gang had spent the night partying in his room.  Needless to say he doesn't do things like that any more.

Today's witticism:  "I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing".